Notes

1] The poem's title alludes to William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Another homage to Théophile Gautier, this time his "Bûchers et tombeaux" (Émaux et Camées [1858]):

Eliot wrote an essay on the plays of John Webster, a Renaissance playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, and included it in his The Sacred Wood in 1920. Back to Line

9] John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and (at his death) Bishop of London. In his essay on "The Metaphysical Poets," published in 1921, Eliot wrote that "A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility." Back to Line

17] B. C. Southam, following Ezra Pound, identifies Grishkin as "Serafima Astafieva (1876-1934), a Russian dancer with the Diaghilev company who opened her own ballet school in London. Pound introduced her to Eliot, `with the firm intuito that a poem wd result & intention that it should'; and elsewhere Pound recollected that once `I took Parson Elyot to see the Prima Ballerina and it evoked "Grushkin"'" (A Guide to The Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot, 6th edn. [San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994]: 110). Cf. Gautier's "Carmen":

31] our lot: our sort of people, i.e., the type Eliot consorts with, those who have a philosophical bent of mind and who, even when they appreciate the senses (as Webster and Donne do), tend to see it in the context of skeletons and death (that is, the world of "dry ribs"). Back to Line